Narrator
In the ''Harry Potter'' series, the story is relayed to the audience via an extradiegetic narrator, a detached third-person observer close to the action, but in no point involved in it (heterodiegetic). At several points in the books, there are also intradiegetic (either autodiegetic or homodiegetic) narrators for a brief period, such as Bartemius Crouch Jr in part of the thirty-fifth chapter of (Veritaserum), or Rubeus Hagrid in part of the twentieth chapter of (Hagrid's Tale). In the most common official audiobooks of the Harry Potter series, the narrator's voice is that of Stephen Fry (British-English speaking countries) or Jim Dale (U.S.). Narrator analysis The narrator is, at all times, heterodiegetic — that is, they are exterior to the story and never take part in the action — and, as such, speaks in third-person. Verb tenses are invariably given in the past. The narrator is also omniscient: they seem to have a detailed overview of what is going on at any place of the story, and at any time, as well as a deep level of insight into the characters' thoughts and feelings despite not always relaying them to the reader. Rowling chose a close third-person narrator, which means that they tend to follow one character in the action and limits the information they relay to what is happening in the proximity of that character. This character is almost always Harry Potter, although there are moments in which this focalisation changes: Vernon Dursley ( , chapter one), Albus Dumbledore ( , chapter one), Ronald Weasley and Hermione Granger ( , chapter eleven), Frank Bryce ( , chapter one), the Prime Minister ( , chapter one). There are times, however, like in chapter two of , or in chapter one of , where the narrator is uncharacteristically objective, and does not relay anything more than facts about the scene before them — they become a third-person observant narrator. Rowling uses this device in crucial scenes in which the protagonist, Harry Potter, is not present, in order to deceive the reader into thinking characters mean something that they really do not without overtly lying. Behind the scenes *Notably, a narrator makes an appearance in some of the early ''Harry Potter'' video games. In both the PC and PS1 versions of , the narrator reads Harry's story from an illustrated storybook. In the GBA version of the game, the narrator's lines are accompanied by a picture of Albus Dumbledore (when relaying the story prior to the start of the game), a Gryffindor crest (when relaying temporal information), or a Game Boy Advance (when relaying gameplay hints to the player). In the PS1 version of the following instalment, the storybook narrator makes his final appearance: in all the following instalments in which he makes an appearance ( and ), he speaks while cutscenes are playing. *Some speculated that the Unidentified pipe-smoking wizard pictured in the back cover of the original editions of , was meant to depict the narrator, although this was not the artist's original intention. In fact, he was commissioned simply to create a portrait of a wizard and had no particular character in mind."Harry Potter and the Mysterious Wizard", by Thomas Taylor in That Elusive Line Notes and references Category:People (real-world)